1 octobre 2007

I know I’m late to the party for Facebook addicts (the thing is, I didn’t think there’d be any French people on there), but here goes nothing: if you want to know everything that’s happening to your account, download FMenu for OS X. Simple, light-weight, displays a notifier in the menubar that’s configurable in every way (except for the keyboard shortcuts, which don’t seem to work at all). Much more convenient than having to go to my Gmail inbox to delete the overload of notifications.

Particularly interesting when you consider that Facebook is the second best web chat I know after GayAttitude (that’s the one I developed myself), and its only drawback is that it doesn’t notify you of new messages unless you reload the page (or receive spammy — or bacny, rather — notifications in your mailbox).

How often is too often? The default interval is 6 seconds — maybe that is what I should be using to keep my MacBook’s connection alive.

P.S. There are 23 checkboxes on the notifications page, and no “deselect all” option. Heh.

I’d just like to say I really like the new Zune’s home screen (it’s much more 2.0ish than the iPhone’s, isn’t it? well, okay, if I say it that way it doesn’t sound so good) and I love that it has a trackpad.

Of course, the iPod remains completely unthreatened, though. Even though it’s a little appalling that Microsoft got to wireless syncing before Apple did. (Not to mention the possibility to sync with your Windows PVR, which will be completely underused in the wild, but sounds seriously cool.)

There are all sorts of other devices that are, at heart, technically, computers, but which aren’t sold or promoted or marketed as such. Like say, TiVos. And iPods.

What’s different and weird and, I think, unique about the iPhone is that for a few weeks before the release of the 1.1.1 update, we got a taste of what the iPhone could be like as an open computing platform.

And that’s why the whole “uproar” over 1.1.1 will have next to zero impact on the real-world markets (or on Apple’s reputation), because it only really affects a few thousand American early adopters who were geeky enough to hack their brand new iPhone. And, by definition of being geeks, they don’t have the clout to counterbalance Apple and Steve’s charisma.

6 octobre

It’s getting really repetitive and predictable. And, unlike the part with Celia, the final scene is a rather weird way to celebrate National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and encourage early detection.

I guess that’s what happens when Kevin Smith is not directing the show, then? I know it’s not me; I was laughing to a South Park episode ten minutes earlier. Can’t even fathom how they got Smith to do the pilot in the first place.

Wondering if the Prius is real product placement or an ironic choice from the writers. Considering they didn’t do much with it, I’m thinking it’s the former, which is slightly braver than you’d expect from Toyota, but still lame.

As usual, the adults are missing the point: “It’s all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box and whose personal information personified the cuisine of China.” Now that Facebook is taking itself seriously, the site is being given a hasty intellectual makeover, retrofitted with a “social graph.”

Google buys Jaiku. What confuses me is that Jaiku is far from being as popular as Twitter — even if it’s more functional. There has to be some kind of bad blood between Ev Williams and Google preventing a deal.

There will be inevitable comparison’s with Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball, which largely came to nothing, but it would appear that the time for social networking and blogging via mobile has come. Google’s ability to add scale and marketing muscle to Jaiku should be putting Twitter on the back-foot right now.

10 octobre

My God, they’re such Trek geeks, or they got a wholesale bargain. Anyway, still boring. And David A*** isn’t that good at playing afraid of the Devil and other emotions he didn’t have to have in that other show.

From my inbox: “In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.” This is fucking insane. Jaiku is the runner-up in its field (even though I think it’s older than Twitter); they’ve got this opportunity to get more massive buzz than they ever did, and what do they do? Close down the signup page.

Either they’re just madmen, or Google really has something huge and spectacular down the pipe. And, even then…

John Siracusa: “Why can’t I figure out how to follow someone new in Twitter?” Thank you for making me feel less alone! I think it’s amazingly moronic that the “Follow” button is in the middle of the page’s contents instead of the sidebar where it belongs, and every time I want to add someone it takes me a full minute to remember where that damn button is.

12 octobre

But the term “rip-off” is thrown about way too much. […] Often times, two projects are merely tapping into the same cultural zeitgeist, employing trends that no single person can claim credit for creating. It’s a common misconception that the first person who does something is the “inventor” of that trend. Not until the idea has been picked up and repeated a few hundred times does it become a trend. Thus, the act of reproduction and emulation is as crucial to authorship as the original instance of the idea.

It’s refreshing to see a graphics blog take a balanced stance on that issue. (Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with the Bravia ad. It’s a little more than just legitimate inspiration when you’re using the same landscape, same animals, same colors and you mix in the bunny wave concept lifted from another visual in the same artist’s portfolio.)

I won’t spoil you the surprise of clicking on the link above. There’s something strangely exciting about developing a Facebook app, knowing that there’s billions of people just a few electrons away from you (and that you’ll never reach them). The API is pretty well done, actually — better than I expected.

Your instinct to love and be loved is rooted very deeply in your subconscious and affects most of the decisions you make in life – whether you are aware of it or not. You inspire people to experience their true feelings of love and act kindly towards others. You also value your personal relationships more than most people.

Your unique capacity to love may be greater than those around you, which means you may have more to give in relationships than your friends or romantic partners do. Your psyche is very rich; the more you learn about it, the more you will understand who you really are… [and that’s why you want to purchase the complete report for £8.95.]

Very curious to compare with what other people get, to see if the nice answer isn’t hard-coded into the results page. (Don’t let the interstitial ad and the “buy your report” page discourage you from finding the link for a free sampler.)

I only got it because I was surprised to see Ally Walker on a video capture, but it’s got surprisingly good writing (and acting) for a courageous-breakthrough-American-show-with-cocks-and-balls-on-screen (-in-the-pilot). They must be fans of Patrice Chéreau or maybe even Catherine Breillat, but they bring the little Hollywood touch that makes the thing digestible.

I love how they started with subtle product placement and then figured, hey, that went well, let’s go ahead and… be less subtle! Well, at least TiVo is a change from Prius.

I have lost more than one cellphone to water damage […] Normally, though, one could take the phone into their carrier’s store and feign ignorance. […]

The iPhone, as well as the iPod touch, have a small white disk inside the headphone jack that, when in contact with water, turns color. Many high-end phones have this as well, usually under the battery or battery cover.

I really like making those; two days of programming for a real social app, with (almost) every tedious management aspect handled by Facebook for you and access to millions of users (in theory). Unlike the previous app, this one has a real social component: you can compare your inkblot test answers with those of your friends, and post comments.

Either Facebook has server problems right now, though, or my app is making profiles crash occasionally. But that shouldn’t be possible. And I’m not doing anything special at all.

(Photoshopping custom inkblots — because the Rorschach Society is apparently quite lawyer-happy, and even though their copyright claims are pretty much baseless I’d like to avoid having Facebook quickly cave in and remove my application — is weiiird.)

P.S. Developing Facebook apps is great, except when Facebook startsserving errors for every page even though our server works perfectly fine.

18 octobre

Font Auto-Activation: Automatically activate fonts as you need them. When an application requests an installed font that’s currently disabled, Leopard activates that font and keeps it active until the requesting application quits.

I’m not sure whether I didn’t know, or just forgot about it; in any case, it’s very cool. Assuming that Font Book (whose new ability to print preview lists becomes all the more interesting in this context) can handle my about 4,000 fonts.

Now that I think about it, though, it won’t work unless the applications actually ask for fonts by name — which Photoshop, for instance, won’t do if it doesn’t know the font can be auto-activated. In other words, system font activation might very well not be available in Adobe apps until CS4.

“Leap. Your new Finder” [via], from the developers of the critically-acclaimed, but rather niche, PDF cataloging application named Yep. The beta-demo is unusable on my computer (and crashed once) but that’s because it relies on Spotlight, which is dog slow here and will hopefully improve with Leopard (and I assume they’ll also leverage Quick Look to display thumbnails faster); the interface, however, looks amazing. It doesn’t have Cover Flow, but the iPhoto-like icon view is close enough (yeah, technically, it’s probably even more functional); and what the demo video doesn’t show is that you only have to click a button to switch between search-based navigation and a regular folder hierarchy, which means you can use Leap in every context of your workflow — it would have been useless if you had to switch between Leap and the Finder (or something else) depending on how you want to browse your files.

I’ve been checking out every Finder replacement wannabe under the sun, hoping for something really good to come out, so believe me when I say: you have to check this out.

19 octobre

Uh-huh. I used not to be able to type underscores; now the whole keyboard layout is qwerty. Unless I missed an option somewhere, I strongly recommend against upgrading for now if you actually rely on Remote Desktop. It’s fortunate that I was just planning to sell my laptop.

I haven’t read all the articles about “how even free can’t defeat BitTorrent” (I haven’t read any single one in its entirety, actually, because I don’t care so much); has anyone at all noted that, if you do intend to get the album for free, it’s much less guilt-trippy to download it from Pirate Bay than to click the “I’m a low-life cheapskate who won’t give you a cent” button on the Radiohead site? Doing that feels like demeaning yourself and insulting the band; downloading on P2P is just treating them the same way you do with everyone else. (And there’s also fewer forms to fill before you get to downloading.)

A better test would have been for Radiohead to offer the album on BitTorrent themselves, and put a Paypal donation box on their site. And I’m not blindly defending the honor of P2P users — I do think the band would have made less money that way.

Two interesting things happened since I last really tried Flock: I seriously got into social networks (Twitter and Facebook); and the browser functionalities improved.

Let’s start with the not-so-new: the media bar has existed since the very first versions of Flock, but I didn’t know, or didn’t care, that it also handled YouTube (or maybe it didn’t then but does now), which makes it an ideal time-waster.

I’m not sure how new this is either, but it’s pretty cool: the search box displays results inline à la Inquisitor and, more importantly, lets you search your history as well — as far as I can tell it only takes titles into account, but that means you can find a page you read earlier by just remembering what it’s about or where it’s from, without having to browse through an endless list of page titles in the history menu.

Twitter and Facebook integration: the sidebars could be organized slightly better, but they’re a good start nonetheless — I particularly like that Flock auto-detects that you’re logging into the websites and just offers to remember your account information and add the toolbar. As simple as it gets.

The main problem with Flock, really, is that it uses the Firefox rendering engine, which I don’t like as much as WebKit. And the sidebars don’t really make optimal use of the screen real estate they occupy, which is pretty frustrating on the 13-inch MacBook.

I’m not sure I’m going to switch — I’m a geek, and I like more customization and functionality — but Flock actually looks to be the ideal browser for people who spend their days checking their online accounts.

20 octobre

@apple@

Leopard Guided Tour. Simple, and very well done, obviously (except for the sound being slightly out of sync on my download). You won’t learn anything if you’ve played with the beta, or even just religiously followed all the reports and presentations (as you are expected to), but it’s informative and should be included in the DVD install if it isn’t. Actually, I even did learn something: Mail has “data detectors.” How Newtonian of it. (Don’t know if it hadn’t been announced or I just missed / forgot it.)

The most interesting aspect of all those guided tours Apple puts out, of course, is the clearly deliberate, consistent casting choice. I wonder how much effort it took the marketing department to convince Steve Jobs they should hire Justin Long rather than Richard Gere for the “I’m a Mac” commercials — no, he doesn’t see himself as a snotty young hipster, but as a grey-haired, calm and simple guy. Isn’t that healthy and balanced now?

Anyway, I hope they’ve hidden a Time Machine screensaver from the beta builds. (And they probably haven’t, because it would be confusing, from a UI point of view, to have the Time Machine backdrop play as a screensaver. Damn.)

There was a time when you were supposed to avoid using “click here” in a link or button caption, because some users were not equipped with a mouse. Now it could arguably be recommended that you do use “click here” for the most important links, because so many of your visitors are not equipped with a brain.

WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage[via]. HTML5 includes Google Gears functionality? Color me impressed. It’s a shame that for the next five years it’ll be much more realistic to expect the user has installed Google Gears than upgraded from Internet Explorer 6.

Listening to an old Kevin Smith podcast, I just found out why the Devil in Reaper takes so much interest in that poor schmuck’s case: there was a demon / helper / whatever character that the director dropped because he couldn’t hire the actor he wanted. I’m not complaining, because Smith brought more exposure and expectations to this show than it ever deserved in the first place, but I still think it’s pretty lame.

A 12-inch Cintiq (couldn’t find it on the Wacom website, but it’s crap anyway). Cool, huh? For 1,200 euros (and roughly as many dollars, I guess). Not so cool.

What are you supposed to do with it? If you’re going to spend so much money on a tablet, you’ve got to have a pretty serious setup on your desktop; are you expected to drag your Photoshop windows from your 30-inch Cinema Display to the MacBook-sized tablet hardly has enough pixels to draw an entire webcomic? That’s just silly.

By the way, I can’t believe the 21-inch Cintiq is still 1600x1200 only. When a device already costs 3,000 euros and targets very dedicated professionals (and some geeks with a disgusting lot of disposable income), maybe you can add a couple hundred to the price tag and offer a decent resolution by today’s standards.

24 octobre

@apple@

Mac OS X Leopard 9A581’s Dock Visual Tweaks[via]. I can’t remember which developer blogger wrote a couple days ago that developers who had taken Leopard beta screenshots with the Dock on the side would have to scrap them, but it was someone I trusted to be serious, so I don’t doubt this rumor — and my take on it is: shit! I liked the shelf Dock even on the side, and I use it on the left side on my MacBook, so I’m going to be directly affected. Oh, wait, I’m selling my MacBook, so I won’t be.

Still, I don’t want the old Dock in my OS X install! Couldn’t they have fixed the transparent menu bar instead?

Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms. It’s weird seeing all my blogs (and everybody else’s blogs as well) having the same PageRank as Engadget. Wonder how long it will last and/or how important PR really is anymore if fives are so easy to get.

I’m not certain (I can never make my brain process the lists of “claims” that define a patent) but it looks a lot like it’s not only affecting Mahalo, but pretty much any single wiki CMS in existence. (Which, evidently, provides ample prior art, beyond the whole obviousness factor.)

You know, some days I really can’t believe that geeks use — and recommend — Amazon so much. There’s this “vote with your wallet” thing that I can’t really condone here because I think it’s illegal in France or something, but you’ve got to wonder how we’ve all turned a blind eye on the fact that they’re most famous for patenting the use of cookies, basically.

26 octobre

1Password free today[via]. If the current version is compatible with Leopard (and the version history mentions Leopard compatibility, so it should be), it’s a nice bargain. Kinda by definition it is. (I don’t think 1Password is worth buying, because the OS X keychain works well enough for most cases, but it can be useful in those few instances where you need to remember several passwords for the same domain — cough Google cough — or for online banking websites that prevent your browser from memorizing passwords.)

29 octobre

John Siracusa’s Leopard review is a must-read, as every time, and commenting it feels like blogging about a Stevenote — short of copying everything he said, you end up with a messy post made of disjointed observations. But what else can you do?

I started off just wanting to quote a nice image about the Finder’s obnoxious “Always open as…” checkbox in the folder View Options window (which I did blog about earlier):

This avalanche of mandatory explicit action effectively represents a denial of service attack on the spatial style of file management.

But then how could I resist launching a rumor based on the behavior of Dock stacks?

Apple calls this view “Fan.” The curve is jaunty, but it also makes it a bit more difficult to click items high in the stack, requiring a varying amount of lateral motion rather than a straight shot upwards. Putting the “Show in Finder” icon is at the top seems particularly cruel.

Picture this: What if Steve Jobs spent the whole Leopard development cycle playing with a touch-screen Mac that’s just about to be released? The rightward arc would make so much sense that way. (If it were just designed for and influenced by the iPhone, then it would have been introduced on the iPhone first, wouldn’t it?)

And I hadn’t thought about that one important tip:

If you use any sort of virtualization software like VMware or Parallels, each virtual machine hard disk image is a multi-gigabyte file that changes pretty much every time you use the VM. Double ugh. […]

In the meantime, it is possible to exclude individual files from Time Machine backups by dragging them into the “Do not back up” list available in the Time Machine preference pane. That will exclude the file by path.

Oh, funny that. I would have been stuck with blue screens on several of my Macs, most likely the iMac, if I had upgraded to Leopard this week-end. I must have been a bit naive for thinking removing the prefPane would be enough to uninstall Application Enhancer.

Okay, now that fate has spared me the worst (hopefully), maybe it’s time I actually manage to get that damn cat.

31 octobre

Hiring Veronica Mars to play Veronica Mars could have been a nice meta in-joke if it’d only lasted for a few minutes, but it should have moved on more quickly to having her do something interesting. I mean, really interesting. Kristen Bell deserves better than playing a kinda-detective girl who argues with her dad on the phone in her car — again.

Google’s OpenSocial API. So I’ve got to choose between learning how to develop for Facebook, or how to develop for Orkut, LinkedIn and Friendster, huh? Yeah, I’m, like, totally undecided, you know, both sides are so totally tempting.

Well, I guess it might be true if you consider the Brazilian hunk (and bimbo) factor.